Punk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Brad Birnbaum, Co-Founder & CEO of Kustomer, a top-rated AI Customer Service & CRM software platform provider. Brad and I talk about why the pace of AI adoption is not a technology problem, but rather the bottleneck sits elsewhere; how the idea that using AI in CX will cost less than people doesn’t stand up to scrutiny; and how most CX leaders are asking whether AI will replace their service teams, but their thinking should be elsewhere, amongst other things.

By the way, I’ll be speaking at Kustomer’s ROI of CX Virtual Summit, which is taking place on Tuesday, October the 20th. Check it out!

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why marketers have an orchestration problem rather than a content problem – Interview with Eric Stine of Sitecore – and is number 605 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Eric Stine, the Chief Executive Officer of Sitecore, a global leader in AI-powered digital experience software. We talk about a range of things, including why the website still matters, but it’s not where discovery starts; why marketers don’t have a content problem, but rather they have an orchestration problem; how marketers can reach their customers in this AI-infused world; and also whether AI is going to kill SaaS or software.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Eliminating the Coordination Tax – Interview with Dan O’Connell of Front – and is number 604 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Dan O’Connell, CEO of Front, the customer operations platform built for collaboration. We talk about a range of issues, from where the CX landscape is heading to the Saaspocalypse, tokenomics, why (in experience terms) everything feels the same right now, the Coordination Tax, how Support, Customer Success, and Account Management are becoming more unified, and what needs to happen to create a more unified front (pardon the pun!) office.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The human edge in B2B customer experience – Interview with Anna Falcon of MCA Connect – and is number 603 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Anna Falcon, VP of CX Transformation at MCA Connect - a Grant Thornton Company. We talk about why B2B firms must deliver B2C‑level experiences or risk losing relevance, what’s driving this imperative, why so many AI initiatives and transformations fail to deliver value, and why we need to put humans at the centre of transformation.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why contact deflection creates quiet loyalty erosion – Interview with Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect Customer – and is number 602 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Pasquale DeMaio, Vice President and General Manager of Amazon Connect Customer, Amazon Web Services’ AI-powered customer experience platform, which supports more than 20 million customer interactions daily across 42 countries.

We talk about how every customer now expects concierge-level treatment, regardless of how much they spend; the implications for brands; the phenomenon of ‘quiet loyalty erosion’; why loyalty is the only metric that matters now; human superpowers; and how customer experience (i.e. the contact centre space) has shifted from cost center to strategic growth driver.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Reinventing the organisation to drive better customer and employee outcomes – Interview with Ricardo Semler – and is number 601 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Ricardo Semler, a champion of radical, employee-friendly corporate democracy, a vision he successfully realised during his 40 years as CEO of Semco Partners. He went on to build Semco Style Institute (SSI) on that foundation and has shared its learnings with companies across the world in the intervening years.

This chat was a bit of a fan-boy moment for me, as I read his first book, Maverick, back in the 1990s. It blew my mind then and continues to inspire me today. He joins me today to talk about a new ebook he recently published, The End of The Boss. We talk about the book, the Relevance Imperative, how today’s corporations are structurally unprepared for the forces reshaping work, particularly AI and remote autonomy, to say nothing of rebellious Gen Z and Gen Alpha talent, a new organisational architecture: the Round Pyramid, why employees should be able to hire and fire their own bosses, and the example of the Botanique Hotel & Spa, which applied the Round Pyramid in practice and what happened to customer, employee and business outcomes.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why your contact centre cost model is broken – Interview with Robert Bradshaw of WiserOwl – and is number 600 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Robert Bradshaw, the founder and president of WiserOwl, a consulting firm that measures what contact centre work actually costs. We talk about how contact centres measure activity with extraordinary precision but cost it using an average that erases all of that precision, what that means in practice, the impact of AI on all of that, what contact centre leaders should be doing instead, and how using actual cost data solves the two most important contact centre problems in the enterprise. It’s a fascinating discussion.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why digital accessibility is no longer optional in an AI-first world – Interview with Jeff Coyle of Siteimprove – and is number 599 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Jeff Coyle, Head of Strategy at Siteimprove, an agentic content intelligence platform designed to unify accessibility, analytics, SEO/AEO, and content strategy.

We talk about the idea that digital accessibility has often been treated as a compliance obligation or a “mission-driven initiative” by enterprise organisations, but AI is now making that untenable. We also cover why digitally accessible information has a significant and positive impact from a technical SEO standpoint, the impact of AI-powered search (AEO/GEO) on all of this, and what brands should be doing to address this issue.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Using generative agent simulations to drive better experience outcomes in healthcare – Interview with Sri Narasimhan of CVS Health – and is number 598 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Sri Narasimhan, the VP of Enterprise Customer Experience and Insights at CVS Health, where he leads efforts to drive meaningful organisational changes based on customer, client, and patient feedback.

We talk about a whitepaper that he recently co-authored with Simile CEO Joon Park on using generative agent simulations in health care, the problem they are solving with this new approach, whether that means they will no longer be doing research with ‘real’ customers, how they have built their AI “agentic twins”, the impact of this approach and how their customers (patients) are responding to their use of AI.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Start with Strategy, Iterate Like a Band – Interview with Craig Crisler of SupportNinja – and is number 597 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Craig Crisler, CEO at SupportNinja. Craig and I discuss why the CX industry is at an inflection point, why most CX problems aren’t actually people problems, how AI is exposing (and sometimes worsening) CX gaps, how new agents will learn in the wake of large-scale automation of many simple and routine tasks, and how more experienced agents will ‘rest’ when their work is focused solely on more complex issues, amongst other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The NiCE World London Takeover of the Punk CX Podcast Part Two – and is number 596 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.